1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates to a message announcement system for announcing necessary information about events at a station and, more particularly, to a modular message announcement system capable of accommodating the addition or removal of stations.
2. Description of Related Art
For purposes of discussion, the prior art and the details of the invention will be directed to a rail system with trains and rail stations. However, it should be appreciated that the subject invention may be applicable to other areas as well, such as announcement systems and other types of transit systems and with announcement systems for other unrelated systems, for example, announcements at attractions at amusements parks.
Directing attention to the invention as applied to a rail system, usually, when a train approaches or arrives at a station, an announcement about the approach or arrival of the train is performed at the station. Such announcements are usually transmitted in one of two ways. In one scenario, all stations have a bank of stored automated announcements that are activated by signals generated within the rail system. When it is necessary to add, delete or modify a stored announcement, the storage at each station must be manually modified. Additionally, any time a live announcement must be made at one or more stations, a separate PA system than that used to broadcast stored audio announcements or a separate sign system to broadcast live text messages is used. Therefore, in this scenario, two separate systems are required.
In an alternate scenario, both live and automated announcements are broadcast from a central location to each station. This arrangement is suitable when the system has a small number of stations, however, the complexity of such a system is unmanageable for systems having a large number of stations.
A message announcement system is desired that will not only accommodate both automatic announcements and live announcements, but will furthermore permit the addition, deletion and change of stored announcements at each station from a central location. Furthermore, a system is needed that will have the flexibility to allow the announcement system to be extended to new stations or taken away from removed stations with a minimal effort.